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Source text - EnglishAll travel is now merely a means of moving a camera from place to place, all travellers are ruled by the all-powerful lens. Visitors old-fashioned enough to wish only to stand and look with their anachronistic eyes are shoved aside by the photographers, who take it for granted that while they do their ritual focusing, nothing else may move or cross their vision. Those peculiar souls without a camera must step aside for those more properly occupied, must wait while the rituals take place, and must bide their time while whole coaches stop and unleash upon the landscape the Instamatic God. And the populations of whole countries seeing themselves cannibalised, swallowed up, vacuumed into the black-ringed staring eye, wrench what they can from the cannibals. You want picture my house, my camel? You pay.

None of this would matter, perhaps, if anything worthwhile was being accomplished. If all the constant busyness and clicking produced, at its end, what had not existed before, images of beauty captured or truth told. But, sadly, this isn't so. The camera is simply graffiti made respectable.

The camera is the means by which we stamp ourselves on everything we see, under cover of recording the Wonders of the World already wonderfully
recorded by professionals and on sale at every corner bookshop and newsagent. But what use to show Aunt Maud, back home, postcards of the Tuscan landscape, since we are not in the picture to prove that we were there?

No stretch of rocks has verity unless I am within it. No monument exists
but for my wife, leaning against it. No temple is of interest without my face beside it, grinning. With my camera I appropriate everything beautiful, possess it, shrink it, domesticate it, and reproduce it on my blank sitting-room wall to prove to a selected audience of friends and family the one absolutely vital fact about these beauties: I saw them, I was there, I photographed them, and, ergo, they are.

from "Amateur Photography: the World as it isn't and our Fred" by Jill Tweedie in the Guardian

Source text - EnglishEroticism has this in common with an addictive drug: that there is a coercive element to its pleasure with which part of us is in complicity, and part not. Thus ever since time began men have been trying to enjoy eroticism without being destroyed by it. Societies, religions can be defined in the way they deal with this conundrum. Polygamy, monogamy with repression, monogamy with affairs, monogamy with prostitutes, serial monogamy. Not to mention individual solutions of great ingenuity, or desperation: Victor Hugo with the door knocked through the wall of his office, to let in a girl each afternoon. Auden's flair for finding call-boys in every town. Picasso who simply refused when wife and mistress demanded he choose between them. Then there is always the hair-shirt of course. But perhaps the thing to remember when you wake up with a life full of fresh paint and tortuous complications is that eroticism wasn't invented for you, nor merely for the survival of the species perhaps, but for a divinity's entertainment. Nothing generates so many opportunities for titillation and schadenfreude as eroticism. Which is why it lies at the centre of so much narrative. How the gods thronged the balconies of heaven to see the consequences of Helen's betrayal! And your friends are watching too. Your antics have put the shine on many a late-night conversation.

On the borders between mythology and history, that wily survivor Odysseus was the first who learnt to trick the gods. And perhaps his smartest trick of all was that of lashing himself to the mast before the Sirens came in earshot. There are those of course who are happy to stand at the railings, even scan the horizon. Otherwise, choose your mast, find the ropes that suit you: sport, workaholism, celibacy with prayerbook and bell... But the kindest and toughest ropes of all are probably to be found in some suburban semi-detached with rowdy children and a woman who never allows the dust to settle for too long.

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